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Massaging your Music Creativity into a Finished Beat

“Creativeness often consists of merely turning up what is already there.”
(Bernice Fitz-Gibbon)

At first, being creative is a very subtle entity… It is that voice and those thoughts that quietly give you amazing song and musical ideas… Sometimes, the mind is too noisy or busy to understand. Sometimes, it’s easy to hear but not listen – We hear ideas but don’t write them down. Other times, there are ideas that have potential, but need massaging. These ideas usually visit you the most often and often get neglected the most too…

The process of massaging your music creativity starts with ‘intent listening’ when inspiration speaks. Then take action.

By turning down inner noise and focusing on those abstract, crazy, and very personal ideas, more music creativity and possibilities begin to unfold. When you are open and always listening, more ideas can be heard. Very rarely to often times never is a great song or music production ‘inspired to perfection’. They are handcrafted, reconstructed, and massaged to perfection – massaged to sooth the ears of others…

Massaging your Music Creativity into a Finished Beat is a process which begins with ‘turning up’ what you may miss on a daily basis, capture it, and then edit it to excellence. The power of rewriting and editing is beyond comprehension. New lyrics, different rhythms & rhymes, new melodies, entirely different arrangements, or new music can all be added to or subtracted from any composition… The problem most have is holding on to their baby in fear of change, fear of it maturing, fear of becoming something bigger and greater, fear of success…

Tutorial: Massaging your Music Creativity into a Finished Beat:

Constantly capture your new ideas
Edit and re-write your ideas until you push your own personal boundaries.
Take a break from starting new material until all your beats and songs are finished.

This process will keep you from having ‘thousands of unfinished beats’.

Massage your music production until you are ‘caught’ up and can finish one beat at a time before moving to the next one. This will keep you super charged creatively and also give you a hefty beat catalog.

By the practice of massaging your muscles of ideas, songwriting and music productions can transform from infancy to maturation overnight.

How to Focus on your Music Brilliance

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“What we must decide is perhaps how we are valuable rather than how valuable we are.” (Edgar Z. Friedenberg)

Record companies used to develop artists into the best writers, musicians, and performers. Today, I find artist’s are getting lost in the DIY. The catch? Without the ‘Do it Yourself’ Approach, nothing would get done for artists with no funding.. The challenge becomes how to recoup from the loss of focus, music creativity and inspiration.

Here’s How to Focus on your Music Brilliance:

What is it that you are truly brilliant at? What is it that you find yourself always thinking about during the day – which aspect of your ‘artistry’ is it? Do you hurry home every day to write more songs, write more music, to dance, to sing, to play an instrument, to work on setting up your music business? Whichever it is and whatever order you enjoy it in will determine your music brilliance, your musical value…

By spending time in areas you’re already valuable in, you can get to your goals quicker by finding others who can help you in the areas your uncomfortable in. It is proven that you are more efficient by doing the things you love and eventually, it can make the parts you don’t love flow much smoother… Through time, your talents will start to even out in all areas of the music process.

Either way though, you’ll need to Invest in your Music Business if you want to take your music from hobby to professional. Just remember, your daily focus is to not get lost in the process. When doing those things you don’t like to do always remember to make time focusing on what you love and you’ll find your passion just around the corner…

Songwriting Tips for Lyrics and Making Beats on a Time Crunch

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“Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose – a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.” (Mary Shelley)

When inspiration comes at you, it strikes with words, melodies, & music that can often seem overwhelming. It can be such an information overload that if sidetracked for one slight moment, all creative ideas could be lost. The most important thing to know in times of inspiration is acknowledging the desired end result.

Here are 3 Songwriting Tips for Lyrics and Making Beats on a Time Crunch:

1) Capture your Lyrics and Theme: Lyrics are Simple. Keep the words flowing on paper, keep them coming until there is nothing left. ‘Afterwards’, figure the theme and song title, then edit, and arrange lyrics.

2) Choose your Song Melodies: Melodies can be a bit trickier.Some melodies can sound great but when adding the words, they get hard to understand or too complex to be enjoyed by your fanbase. The best thing is to get a small recorder to record those great melodies that come randomly. Then, when new lyrics are finished, go through the melodies and see which one blends with the lyrics. This process can transform average melodies to solid hooks. If you need to come up with melodies on the spot, just get on the mic, adlib and record until you find the melody that fits your lyrics.

3) Making Beats for your Songs: Music can be the most challenging because it can be hard to discern when a song is completely ‘finished’. The most important thing is to know your style of music and fanbase. Are you writing songs for yourself, the underground, for a particular style or for the radio? After determining your audience, the last factor is can you listen to the entire song and not hear ‘a thing’ wrong with it? Can you live with the instrument performance or can you ‘really’ do it better? Now this method is assuming that your ears have been technically trained to hear too much compression, eq, an unbalanced mix, etc. If you’re unsure, get a second opinion from someone you know in the industry or who has great sounding productions. Ask them to shoot straight and be honest with you. Once you can listen to a song from front to back without something ‘bothering you’ creatively and technically, it is a sure sign that your song is as complete as you can get it. From there, the ultimate test is to make sure you and your fan base are happy with your creativity.

These 3 Songwriting Tips can help bring clarity to those emotional explosions of inspiration, prevent loss of focus, and can help you write more songs in less time…

Investing in your Music Business Management

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“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will neither have good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither it’s pipes nor it’s theories will hold water” -John Gardiner

Let’s face it… it’s not the 90’s for the music business… For that matter, it’s not any of the previous decades in the music industry.. This is the most exciting time in the music industry… Why?

Your Music Business is all about you. However, that is the good news and the bad news..

Yes, the good news is that anyone writing music has access to distribution that will reach the entire world through iTunes, Napster, BeatPort and many other forms of digital distribution outlets.

The bad news is that no one is going to create the system and give you the talents and direction of how to do this according to your goals and what you personally want to do in the music business. The days of finding a manager, agent, label or company to invest in you are over…. that is, if you have not invested in yourself. What does that look like? Either you have the money to pay people to do it for you, you do it on your own, or you keep creating music as a hobby and never reach it as a lucrative music business. Keep in mind in today’s music business, lucrative starts as part-time and makes its way to full time.

Most artists who are creating music as a hobby for 5-10 years never visualize the process through. Where do you want to end up? “I want to be the best music producer in the world, I want to run a record label, I want to make beats for major labels”. I hear this all the time and try to help people really ‘see’ what that looks like.

Now that you have the end in mind, you must back track to where you are now with your current budget, resources and connections. How do you make it work? If you cannot see it then your end goal is a fantasy. There must be a realistic route to your goal. If there isn’t one, you must keep going back to the drawing board until it all matches up.

Investing in your own music business management is humbling, you have to prioritize, cut out unneeded people and tasks that distract you from your ultimate goals. Let’s face it, it’s hard to put all these things aside and go for your dreams. You’ll start to find that there really are a lot of Posers in the Music Industry once you knuckle down and get to work. People will shrug you off – ‘man you’re too serious, why don’t you loosen up?, why you changing all the time – let’s just go have some fun’.

Personally investing in your music business is challenging at first but once you dig in, start connecting the dots of how to get from point A to point B, you’ll soon find out that its much easier than you thought… AND you’ll find you are talented in more than musical gifts but also staying focused and getting things done.